


where ends meet

by fatiguedfern



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Spoilers, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 08:23:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11940186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatiguedfern/pseuds/fatiguedfern
Summary: The lights blink out, the curtain falls, and Ouma reappears in a wasteland of pixelated dust.





	where ends meet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [idaate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/idaate/gifts).



Bare elbows scrape against splintered wood and the split shards scratch chalky white lines across raised skin. The pinpricks are numbed by the remembrance of said skin pressed into a bloody paste.

The seat beneath him slants as he stands and a giggle escapes him at the thought that even in death (because he’s dead dead _dead_ and corpses don’t rise from their graves without reason and there’s nothing left for him to give) he’s stabilizing things, as slight as they might be. 

His amusement is short lived, knees buckling under weight he’d never fully be able to support and hands gripping at the peeling surface he’d found his head resting on moments prior. This time, the scrap of dulled varnish piercing the print of his thumb is felt.

On closer inspection, the splinter embedded in his fingertip chips off of a decaying school desk. The chair half-tucked under the desk shows signs of similar rot; its three remaining legs wrapped in a crust of auburn flakes. 

The wear is echoed throughout the crumbling room. Rows of rust-lined chairs and tables trail towards the farthest wall. A blackboard - or what’s left of it - hangs askew from hooked nails. Cracks web across the surface, tearing the board in two. Slumped against the wall, the fallen piece dips in debris of its own shedding.

He bends to examine the unsuspended half, thumb brushing against the fractured ridges in pain-jolted curiosity. If the veil of dust layered over poorly erased powder symbols is anything to go by, the board had been left unused for some time. Nonetheless, the lines are more legible than those wiped from its mounted counterpart and he’s able to make out a mess of numbers and symbols, but it’s the sketched face split down the middle that truly gives him pause. 

Ouma regards the smudged drawing with pursed lips.

The chalked Monokuma’s lone serrated eye stares back.

.

Purgatory, Ouma decides, is a manifestation of diluted reflections of his failures.

Hung low enough for it to feel as if the fragmented heavens weigh down on him - threatening to crush him, _again_ \- the sky unfurls in a crudely sewn quilt of skylights. Clouded valleys bleed into sunset layered air and black ink dotted with starlight seeps into bright morning sunlight. Forgotten things lie strewn across the floor, more often than not in collapsed pieces.

Discarded and mismatched. The cluttered chest of a child no longer wishing to be called such. Toys once cherished for their momentary novelty forgotten and left to the mercy of cobwebs and dust. He doesn’t think too hard on why he recognizes some of the bits and frayed ends. Ouma doesn’t dare ask why he wound up atop the heaped dregs. 

The broken landscape twists and spreads and consumes the horizons further than he can foresee. The classroom lies behind him, partially buried beneath fields of rubble. Loose stones grind and spatter with his weighted steps.

He moves past the insect with broken metal wings, claw outstretched and coated in an off pink. 

He keeps moving. Not forwards, nor backwards, but rather circling around the same conclusions. But moving all the same.

.

His throat’s dry.

Time churns through unused days, and without any true indication of its passing, Ouma’s left with nothing but the throbbing pulse between his temples to count the drifting seconds. 

He hasn’t eaten since his fall into disgrace, nor drank anything. Even so, he’s never had much of an appetite anyway and he doubts that he’d be able to force something down. Ouma’s stomach remains still. 

A crack rattles the sky. 

The shooting star arches through the air. But, in the end, all stars fall and the rocket crashes a good distance away, the ground shaking as the smouldering meteor makes impact.

Ouma’s throat contracts and huffed breath seethes against parched flesh walls.

.

It takes longer than expected to reach the crater. More time than he would have had to waste then. 

But it’s not then and time’s irrelevant now.

The Monokuma figurehead grins at him from its perch at the peak of the battered rocket. His eye twitches ever so slightly.

With more caution than he can muster care, he props open the hatch, forefinger tapping against his thumb, the minor discomfort settling his wavering grip.

The rocket’s empty. Magenta paints the insides a colour too bright for the greyscale world beyond. The splatters show signs of wetness and Ouma frowns. His late arrival had allowed the rocket’s occupant to slip into the unknown. How dreadfully disappointing.

Maybe it’s his own fault for not reacting to the shuffled movements behind seconds before the presence had become a threat, but Ouma isn’t too bothered. The shooting pain the blade wedged just right of his spine sends shuddering across his body is quite refreshing, really.

Despite how oddly fitting it is to be stabbed in the back, a knife protruding from his rear would prove troublesome. The knife’s edges slip out with relative ease, damaged tissue aside. 

For a brief moment the corroded blade lies cupped in his palms dripping with blood. Red stutters into pink and then the colour fades away all together. He barely resists the urge to run his unstained fingers over the gaping tear in his skin, and by now whatever forces seemed dead set on keeping him away from the relief brought by nothingness had surely sewn the gaping skin back together.

He turns to face his attacker. Even with a live audience to entertain now, the smile that creeps onto his face is far less strained than what one might expect from someone whose lips crack while doing so.

In his natural state - panicked, unbound, feral - Momota Kaito is anything but boring.

.

“You’re really bad at greeting people, Momota-chan. Didn’t you do good enough a job of killing me last time?”

“Clearly fucking not.”

Ouma idly dangles his legs through the air below the ledge of the trash heap where they’d set up camp, casting the occasional glance in Momota’s direction.

His appearance is disheveled, and not in his purposeful way. Hair clings to his face in clumps of sweat and strands rather than its usual gelled state. His god-awful goatee stands askew and unkempt and his jacket cut from a cosmos suddenly seeming too wide drapes over his slumped shoulders. Uneasy hands fumble with rounded glass picked from cluttered mountains.

“How long’ve you been here?” Momota asks with a seriousness demanding his in return. 

“Long enough to know that whatever you think you’ll accomplish by screaming and pushing and trying will send you spiralling further down the rabbit hole.”

Momota leans his head against battered metal. “Y’know what? Fuck you,” he pauses, smashing the bottle he’d been rolling between his palms against the floor, “and fuck this place too. I don’t care if this shithole swallows me up and spits me back out again, but I ain’t curling up on my side and waiting to disappear. If I can’t fight with them,” he gestures above to the unseen space he’d fallen from, “then I’ll beat the crap outta whatever’s thrown at me.”

Ouma pries his eyes shut and his thumb presses into the autumn-stained dirt. He can’t seem to find the strength through the sudden wave of drowning fatigue that’s swept him up to laugh at the familiar platitudes. “Nice speech, Momota-chan.”

Shattered glass reflects dusty orange sunsets long after they stumble away from the crash sight and deeper into the ruins. 

.

Momota has clumsy fingers. The type that toe the line between meaty and elegant. The type that curl into fists before their master can form words.

Rough fingers cuff around his wrist. 

Ouma wonders how lurid his habit had been coloured if even Momota could notice.

“God, you can heal stab wounds instantly, but you can’t pluck a splinter from your finger?”

Ouma hums in response.

“Just… Just, shut up. You’re hard enough to deal with as is without you having some masochism kink.”

Momota grabs first aid supplies from the bent shelves of the abandoned supermarket they’d taken refuge in. The disinfectant is an unnecessary precaution for a wound that doesn’t blight, but Momota swabs at it all the same.

The band aid he wraps around Ouma’s thumb is purple and dotted with cartoonish stars. Ouma keeps the material wrapped around his finger until the stars fade and the plaster wears.

.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that they aren’t the first to occupy the wasteland. Yet, the discovery tastes stale when presented so clearly. 

Written in erasable lead, the diary recounts another’s narrative as they flounder through ashes and ruination. The blotted out name does well in deciphering the code etched into the world, better than he could have hoped to.

Ouma flicks through the pages for a third time, then a fourth, drinking in each disheartening detail in an attempt to quench his insatiable thirst for resolution.

Somewhere behind him, Momota slurps overripe beans from a dented tin and reacts to the truth of it all with far too little zeal for his apathy to appear even the slightest bit common. 

“Weird how I’m still eating this crap even though I don’t have to, huh?” Momota stares into and through the flames of the fire he’d built from wood chipped from the titanic grand piano's wreckage. “Kinda makes me feel alive. Even if I never really was. At least I don’t have to worry about shitting my pants when the sludge settles.”

Momota tears another strip of fabric from his half-gone coat and tosses it into the flames.  
(“It’s symbolism, Ouma.”  
“Dumb is what it is. Like you.”)

Ouma watches as the fabric withers away in sparks of burning ash, wondering if he should leave the notebook cradled to his chest to the same fate.

He thinks back to the pages. Back to _Danganronpa_. Back to the pathetic creature that’d been so willing to sign his life away that he’d gifted Ouma with existence and their shared deplorable face. 

Ironic how when you lied enough you became nothing but a lie yourself. Or was it the other way around, and when your very breathing had been a lie it was only natural for every word you exhaled to be fabricated. Both shoes fit and Ouma would readily stumble in either.

The next morning - because even though the sliver of patchwork skies they camp under is dark and lit with moonlight, he thinks that he comes to understand time as it swirls in unending coils. He’s done trying to measure the beats of an abstract entity. More than anything, he’s done wallowing in his uncertainty. A new day, he decides.

They cross the seam between night and day. The sun goes unseen, yet still runs lithe fingers of warmth across the paved ground. For once, Ouma isn’t too fussed that he doesn’t feel anything but bitter ice as he skips ahead of Momota.

.

Feathered blades of grass stab at the soles of his bare feet. A gentle sensation that cuts deeper than Momota’s frustrations.

Tattered shoes rest against a looming tree-trunk. Ouma doesn’t glance their way.

Momota dips his slipper-clad feet in the pound sprawled a few feet away. Ouma thinks that he’ll regret it when his steps become soggy and more weighted than before, but he doesn’t say anything.

The plantage is the first sign of life that he’d come across. He might of thought of including Momota on the list of the living, but he’d seen the ringed shadows beneath his eyes and watched as he’d choked through mouthfuls of blood in another life. No, Momota doesn’t count. Neither does he.

Ouma approaches the water slowly, stalking up to Momota with the light precision of a well-trained bird of prey. There’s nothing predatory about his movements; each muscle shift layered with caution.

He taps at the taller boy’s shoulder, arm straining to do so. “Boo~”

Momota jumps in fright and twirls to face him. “Shit! You nearly gave me a heartattack.” 

Ouma taps his finger against his chin in mock thought. “Eh? Do you actually have a heart? With how mean you are to me most of the time, I didn’t think so…”

Momota grumbles something about him being a hypocrite that Ouma doesn’t bother trying to make out.

Ouma refocuses on the body of water ahead. His eyes widen, rippling pools reflected in his glassy pupils. “Is that…?”

“Yeah,” Momota skims a pebble across the liquid, only for the rock to sink into the flickering image projected onto the water. “Looks like we finally found a glitch inside a glitch, huh?” The _other than us_ goes unsaid.

The pound shows a severely modified Kiibo shooting rays of condensed light at an exisal. A nearby bird, flying low enough to be caught in thr crossfire, is blasted out of the sky. Moments later, a bundle of feathers sails through the water and touches down beside them on the shore.

The bird’s body is broken and its wings crushed with no signs of healing. Ouma frowns. Surely if he was to be put back together after being grinded into a bloody stain, then the bird would be recreated?

Ouma kneels to examine the bird. He presses his fingers to the bird's throat. It bobs and flutters in a pathetic whimper. Perhaps an inferior program, the bird wouldn’t heal. A sharp snap resonates as his grip tightens and toothpick bones crunch beneath his fingers. Ouma picks up the carcass, holding it above the water.

Momota speaks, voice uncertain. “Wha-what’re you doing?”

The lukewarm body drops through the tear into the world it was blown out of.  
“Returning it to its cage.”

.

“I win, again!”

Momota grunts in faux acknowledgement, fixated on reflected imploding skies and splattered ringleaders. 

“I could go down there, y’know. When everything clears. I can go see ‘em. Harumaki. Shuuichi. Even Yumeno.”

Ouma doesn’t look up from the grid carved into the mudbank. “I know, but you won’t.” He etches a line through the row of crosses, briefly picturing the Xs framed and coloured red. Yumeno, Harukawa and Saihara’s colourless faces pasted beneath. “If you could have, you would’ve gone when the trial started. Before everything went to hell,” Ouma examines the crust of mud forming at the tip of the stick he’d used to draw, “but you’re still the same idiot. Still the same coward.”

“Fucker. You ain’t one to talk.” Momota slackens as if whatever was left of his fickle will caves in with his pride. He speaks again, now in a whisper, a confession. “If anyone ended up here, I’m glad I didn’t meet them. I’m glad I don’t have to face any of ‘em. At least I payed for failing you. Don’t go thinking I give two shits about you, but I do have morals.” Odd how Momota’s conviction almost seems real. 

And when he presses his lips against Momota’s, teasing and desperate, and the fear and disgust in his eyes as he doesn’t pull back, and the pain that spreads across Ouma’s tongue as Momota bites down. That all feels real too. 

Ouma supposes that it's a kiss goodbye between two people who couldn’t kiss who they wanted to. 

Three survivors crawl out of the pixelated rubble. The leftovers fade along with it.


End file.
